


A Whole New Turn

by Kehuan



Category: Apple - Fandom
Genre: Gen, design fiction, gadgetfic, iPhone, ios 6, iphone 5
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-21
Updated: 2012-09-21
Packaged: 2017-11-14 18:20:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,290
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/518158
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kehuan/pseuds/Kehuan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When the map becomes the territory, poor topography becomes very dangerous indeed.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Whole New Turn

**Author's Note:**

> Yes, I am entirely willing to classify a story based on the iOS 6 mapping application as fanfiction.  
>    
> [Context here.](http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-19659736)

The future always shows up in print before reality, but not for the reasons you think. No one is accurate at predicting the future. Science fiction authors write the present, and consciously trying to make a literary future never works. No, the future only appears in accidental falsehoods, widely distributed. To fool reality, first you have to fool yourself.

That’s what makes guides so dangerous. Diagrams, manuals, blueprints created after the fact — they’re all attempts to explain that end up creating, when the experts get things wrong. But at least their unintended consequences, if negative, can be constrained. Maps are something different, and when the wrong map becomes the territory, things can change very dramatically indeed. Millions of people, all seeing something a little bit off, but never questioning it. Until the nasty, messy discrepancies all fade away. Streets, towns — you can get as big as counties before people start to reject the errors.

Most people who are aware of the problem just ignore it, of course. After all, it’s not as if they’re snuffed out violently, or erased from time. One street gets condemned a few weeks after the latest edition of an atlas is released, and another is shut down naturally. Who can say the difference? It isn’t always even destructive. Plenty of towns have sprung up around a misplaced label.

But there are always luddites, naturalists... people who think a thing is the less valid for being man-made. The natural course for most of them is map-making. You’ve never seen such intricate detail, such loving attention to a piece of topography. And it works, for a few years. No one can stay perfect forever. It’s terrible to live with that kind of weight.

A few years ago, a rumor started spreading: Steve Jobs was a naturalist. A couple of ex-employees posted to the inevitable forums that he’d mentioned a town erased by Google Maps — a reference that would seem merely figurative to the uninitiated. A friend of a friend remembered his refusal to visit a certain street in Palo Alto. Most damningly, he had never once demonstrated the Maps application during a product announcement.

No myth can exist in isolation. Naturally, the rumor that followed it was more concrete, and within six months of the iPhone 4’s release, it was claimed that Jobs himself was spearheading a project to build the map that would kill diagramming shifts forever. It’s easy to laugh at in retrospect, but this was before his cancer was so advanced, and people thought Apple could do almost anything. For a few years, the perfect map seemed almost in reach, every hint of its release pounced upon by eager forum hounds. And then, in 2011, Jobs stepped down, with only a few months to live.

The project seemed dead as well. Without Jobs, Apple seemed headless to us spectators, existing on the documents left by its auteur. The 4S was a disappointment, and Google pulled miles ahead in Maps, with its usual mix of electronically generated errors, those most blameless of falsehoods.

Then we heard about iOS 6.

The moment “new Maps” was out of Tim Cook’s mouth, we all knew what was coming. Jobs had done it, his project completed but not released until the time was right. It was too hard to see anything in the demos, and the betas weren’t proper maps at all. So, breathless, the few people who knew the truth of maps waited to see the project that would stop the shift forever.

We watched the proceedings with a certain amount of melancholy. As unsettling as it could be to watch the progress of a shift, it was reassuring to think there was a power in text and image. If the naturalists won, the human ability to shape one’s surroundings would become a little weaker, even if only in the abstract. So when the first update hit and we saw just how bad Maps really was, we were all relieved. Every tile was some naturalist’s nightmare, down to the pointless mislabels and inaccurate directions. Most of the problems were so obvious that they wouldn’t even get a chance to take effect.

The feeling lasted for almost half a day. Then a single forum post undid it all: _What if they meant for it to be so terrible?_

It took us all some time, but eventually the same thought sunk in for everyone, and we realized just how smart Jobs had been. Every other naturalist, no matter how resolute, had still fundamentally trusted in the power of information. They all had worked within it, making painstaking attempts to bring verisimilitude to data. Steve Jobs, though — he’d decided to break the system altogether.

iPhone users weren’t a majority of the people who checked maps, but they were a plurality. Every melting bridge and flattened monument was a crack in the social framework that made fiction real. Every time someone was led wrong by Maps, they trusted it — and by extension, all maps — just a little less. Steve Jobs hadn’t made an app. He’d made an inoculation.

As the backlash grew over the next few days, Apple made promises to improve its system. But we knew it wouldn’t keep them. No matter how hated, every step had been meticulously planned. Cook wasn’t going to dishonor the legacy of the man who made him, even if (we suspected) he had known nothing of the plan’s original intent. We doubted even Jobs had been aware of most of what was happening, beyond the general idea. He had simply allowed entropy to take its course.

The naturalists, it seemed, had won. A few jokes about bumpy highways were cracked here and there, and a few people seemed to take it in stride when a marked thoroughfare in SoHo turned out to be a long-dead end. Then a few more, and maps didn’t seem nearly as solid as they had been three weeks ago. The forums began to dwindle, as our careful tracking of changes no longer correlated with the ebb and flow of cities.

I forgot, and time passed. I had an iPhone, of course, and though the directions seemed to get marginally better, I acclimated to seeing the occasional mismarked restaurant or inadvertent trap street. They were easy to notice, after all.

And then, one late night in the Bowery, I mapped my way to the Pegu. It gave me an unsurprising road to nowhere, terminating blocks away from the Houston Street address I knew. On a whim, I followed it. New York is a grid, but a few streets slash diagonally, and the route looped me around one, past the subway. The night was unusually clear, I thought, and I felt almost as if I could see the stars. I rounded the corner, wondering what Apple had decided I would see.

Instead of a convenience store or gas station, a black-shirted bouncer greeted me. I checked the map, which still put me far from the bar’s icon. “Did you move?” I asked.

“Sure did,” he told me. “A couple weeks ago.”

As I went upstairs, a part of me felt like I was going home. The maps still had their power, and the world was a little stranger than it had been last week. Then, as I ordered my drink, I considered the other images the map produced. Empty Beijing districts. Collapsing skyscrapers. Monuments laying on the ground, their bases clipped and excised.

The Pegu’s windows had once looked out towards central Manhattan, but now they faced the Hudson. If I looked out, far enough, I thought I could see the twinkling lights of cars on the Brooklyn Bridge.

I wondered if I would still see them when I came back next.


End file.
